Overview
This trip was planned for my retirement (end March 2022), but deferred due to the uncertainties of travel during the Covid pandemic. We have visited Australia twice before. In 1991 we stayed for 3 months mainly in Queensland but we also visited Alice Springs and Ayers Rock in the Northern Territory and Sydney and the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. In 2014 we visited Victoria and Tasmania. This time we sent a little over 2 weeks in Western Australia and 2 weeks in the north of the Northern Territory. As usual, we spent most of our time walking in the national parks and birding.
We flew Qantas direct from Heathrow to Perth - 16h 30m being the longest flight we have ever had - but really it is amazing that you can get all the way to Australia in such a short time. We had one pair of internal flights from Perth to Darwin and back.
The weather in Western Australia was mixed with mostly sunny days with temperatures in the mid 20s and other wet cool days with a high in the low teens degC. The heat was a constant feature of our stay in the north and it was pretty consistently 35℃ from 10am to 4pm and only dropped to ~25℃ at night. It took us some days to adjust to this - it was sapping and made it difficult to embark on any of the longer walks we had planned - even more difficult on days without any breeze to wick away some of the moisture from our sweat-soaked shirts.
April-May is probably not an optimal time for birding in the areas we were visiting as some species are not in breeding colours. Some of the sites we visited in Western Australia had very disappointing bird numbers, notably Rottnest Island (most of the breeding waterbirds having departed), Cape Leeuwin (we went for Rock Parrot and discovered they are only there in the Australian spring, and seabirds - of which none were seen) and Lake Muir (a large 'lake' which was totally dry). The Northern Territory had experienced a cyclone with heavy rains mid-April, this had kept water levels high unusually late into the beginning of the 'dry' season. This hampered our activities to some extent - in Katherine the Cutta Cutta caves NP was completely closed, and much of Kakadu was out-of-bounds. But we would not want to be out of Britain during September / October (probably the optimal time to come to Australia for birds) and I was keen to resume long haul travel after 3 years enforced abstinence.
We did end up seeing a lot of birds, but the images I had from descriptions I had read of an abundance of birds in the national parks, with wetlands teaming with wildlife resulted in a degree of disappointment. We only really witnessed large concentrations of birds on the Yellow Water cruise in Kakadu and at Fogg Dam near Darwin.
As far as other wildlife goes we observed far fewer mammals on this trip than on our previous Australian adventures. On many days we saw no marsupials at all; large numbers (>100 Wallabys) were seen only on the drive between Jabiru and Adelaide River. We saw both species of crocodile, many lizards including several monitor species and 3 snakes (none of which stayed around for a photo). Despite the warmth we saw only a handful of butterfly species in the south-west - far more in the tropical north. Moths were only photographable in the woodland section of our south-west visit; they were certainly present in the north but here any moth landing on a wall by a light would soon be eaten by a gecko. We did see plenty of dragonflies. Flies were a bit of a nuisance sometimes - buzzing around the eyes, but happily we had very little problem with biting insects.
One excellent thing that Britain could learn from Australia is that conservation of wildlife is given a much higher priority than the desire of humans to take their pets with them wherever they go. Dogs are completely excluded from all the national parks and most beach areas we visited.
Park visitor passes are required for national parks in the Northern Territory and in theory we should have been able to purchase a 2-week pass covering all those we visited. There had been a recent change which required all passes to be purchased on-line. In order to do this you have to register. In order to register you have to provide a valid postal code - but the system does not recognise UK post codes. So I registered at our accommodation address. The system then wouldn't let me purchase a pass in the belief that I was a Northern Territory resident - who don't require a visitor pass - impasse. (Pun not intended at the time of writing). We were eventually able to purchase passes for Kakadu at the Bowali visitor centre.
There was much lip-service done to foster good relations between Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians. "We recognise the such-and--such tribe as the traditional owners of this land, and honour their leaders past, present and emerging" was the standard phrasing used - but this was done by the non-indigenous from a position of total dominance and came across as patronising. My impression, from previous visits, and unchanged on this visit, is that Aboriginal Australians as a generalisation, and unlike indigenous people from all other places I have visited, are less advanced than other Homo sapiens (I note that Quora quotes their average IQ at 62).